The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert A Novel

Not everybody lives, and certainly not “happily ever after”—but within all the grisly darkness, Alice’s fierce integrity and hard-won self-knowledge shine unquenched.
-Kirkus

Synopsis

Welcome to Melissa Albert's The Hazel Wood—the fiercely stunning New York Times bestseller with seven starred reviews everyone is raving about!

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away—by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”

Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began—and where she might find out how her own story went so wrong.

NPR

Reviewed by Caitlyn Paxson
on
Jan 30 2018

In these times, I think we need that hope. While I appreciate the hard truths and battles that The Hazel Wood offers, I ultimately wanted a book that believed in the power of fairy tales rather than rejecting it. I think then that it is my failing, not the book's, that left me feeling somewhat hollow at its close.